Miscellaneous

Is the panic and uproar concerning the “college rape crisis” similar to the McMartin preschool travesty? Christina Hoff Sommers sees some similarities.

It appears that we are in the throes of one of those panics where paranoia, censorship, and false accusations flourish—and otherwise sensible people abandon their critical facilities. We are not facing anything as extreme as the Salem Witch Trials or the McCarthy inquisitions. But today’s rape culture movement bears some striking similarities to a panic that gripped daycare centers in the 1980s.

[…]

Today’s college rape panic is an eerie recapitulation of the daycare abuse panic. Just as the mythical “50,000 abducted children” fueled paranoia about child safety in the 1980s, so today’s hysteria is incited by the constantly repeated, equally fictitious “one-in-five women on campus is a victim of rape”—which even President Obama has embraced.

The one-in-five number is derived from surveys where biased samples of respondents are asked an artful combination of straightforward and leading questions, reminiscent of the conclusory interviews behind the daycare agitation. A much-cited CDC study, for example, first tells respondents: “Please remember that even if someone uses alcohol or drugs, what happens to them is not their fault.” Then it asks: “When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had vaginal sex with you.” (Emphasis mine.) The CDC counted all such sexual encounters as rapes.

Reputable studies suggest that approximately one-in-forty college women are victims of rape or sexual assault (assault includes verbal threats as well as unwanted sexual grabbing and fondling). One-in-forty is still too many women. But it hardly constitutes a “rape culture” requiring White House intervention.

She makes it clear that any sort of sexual abuse should be taken seriously and pursued legally. However, she cautions that allowing a panic to take hold simply isn’t in the best interest of anyone. My question remains, why are colleges left to investigate and sort this out anyway? Considering that rape is a major violent crime, seems to me law enforcement should be involved immediately. My guess is that doing so will cut down on both false reports and the crime itself. But hey, what do I know.

In 2014, for the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household.

Obviously part of the problem has to do with the dismal economy. But there’s also something to be said about an education system that doesn’t prepare kids for the real world, participation trophies and helicopter parents. There’s a popular meme that shows the 19 year olds of D-Day storming the beaches of Normandy set off against the special snowflakes at just about any university you can name, huddled up in their “safe spaces” and sharing whatever they’ve identified as their “pain” (you know, like chalk political slogans on the university sidewalk) with counselors. There’s a good reason why there are more adults of 18-34 years of age living in Mom’s basement.

They’ve never been properly prepared to leave the place. Pew Research thinks it is mostly about the economy. Yes, but it is also a lot about the failure of both parents and government (via schools) to prepare these young adults to assume their role in society. Or, perhaps, it is where government is quite happy to see them … in a dependent and pliable status where it can better control them. Who know?

So, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the official unemployment rate dropped by 0.3% to bring it under 5% at 4.7%. How, you might wonder, could the rate drop so drastically when only 38,000 jobs were added last month? Easy. 500,000 Americans were dropped from the calculation, assumed to be no longer looking for work.

The U.S. economy created the fewest number of jobs in more than five years in May, hurt by a strike by Verizon workers and a fall in goods producing employment, pointing to labor market weakness that could make it difficult for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by only 38,000 jobs last month, the smallest gain since September 2010, the Labor Department said on Friday. Employers hired 59,000 fewer workers in March and April. The government said the month-long Verizon strike had depressed employment growth by 34,000 jobs. …

Even without the Verizon strike, payrolls would have increased by a mere 72,000.

The Verizon workers, who were considered unemployed because they did not receive a salary during the payrolls survey week, returned to their jobs on Wednesday. They are expected to boost June employment.

So with weak numbers both March and April, it’s … Verizon. Right. Another in a long line of disingenuous nonsense from your government to fool you in believing everything is on the upswing. Welcome to Recovery Summer #7!

Wendy’s has placed an increasing emphasis on tech as wages have begun rising in regions across the country. Last year, the company opened a technology and innovation center called 90° Labs in Ohio, which it said would be used to “develop differentiating, interactive digital experiences for our customers, employees and franchise system.”

Students at Yale University recently sent a petition asking the English department to drop two required classes covering “Major English Poets” because reading those poets “creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color.”

You see, they want to “decolonize” the course. Note the title – “Major ENGLISH poets”. Included among these poets are Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, and T.S. Eliot. Hmm … everyone of them an ENGLISH poet. Question to the snowflakes – who would you replace them with and still be within the course title? Back when these folks wrote ENGLISH poetry, there were few LGBTQ poets who identified as such. In fact, there weren’t any that I’m aware of who self-identified and focused on that. Same with poets of color. Or feminist poets (note I didn’t say female, but I do leave it to those more expert in this field to identify any major female poet of the time that should be included). All of that my not be particularly agreeable with the SJWs, but it is both reality and history.

“A year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color, and queer folk are absent actively harms students, regardless of their identity.”

Well, here’s an idea, don’t take the course! If it does such “active harm” to the students you identify (and who must have the lowest self-esteem on the planet), then find something else to study. Because like it or not, when you attempt to take your place in society outside of your safe space, they’re not going to excuse the fact that you are ignorant of the major players in ENGLISH poetry.

Here are students who are the most privileged in not only America but likely the world, whining because the object of their study isn’t the right color or sex for them. Apparently the utility of these dead white males is all wrapped up in their skin color and sex. I can imagine what they’d call anyone else who based their approval on such trivialities, can’t you?

A prominent leader in the Ku Klux Klan said the group is officially endorsing Hillary Clinton for president and has already donated $20,000 to her campaign.

Klan leader Will Quigg told Vocativ over the weekend, “For the KKK, Clinton is our choice,” adding, “She is friends with the Klan,” Quigg said. “A lot of people don’t realize that. She’s friends with [the late] Senator [Robert] Byrd. He’s been an Exulted Cyclops in the Klan. He’s been King Kleagle.”

The West Virginia senator was the leader of his state’s Klan chapter in the 1940s, according to Vocativ. In 2005, he publicly disavowed his involvement in the KKK, saying it was wrong. Upon his death in 2010, Clinton described Byrd as a “friend and mentor.” Byrd was among the longest serving senators in the body’s history, holding his seat continuously from 1959 until his passing.

Indeed. And, in fact, he sets the record straight about the Klan:

As for Clinton, “All the stuff she’s saying now, she’s saying so she can get into office, okay? She doesn’t care about illegal immigrants—she’s acting like she does so she can get into office. Once she’s in office, then she’ll implement her policies. She’s a Democrat. The Klan has always been a Democratic organization,” Quigg said.

It certainly has.

John Cleese of Monty Python fame lets us in on his opinion concerning political correctness. He’s not a fan:

And that’s why I’ve been warned recently, don’t go to most university campuses because the political correctness has been taken from being a good idea — which is, let’s not be mean particularly to people who are not able to look after themselves very well, that’s a good idea — to the point where any kind of criticism of any individual or group can be labelled cruel.

And the whole point about humor, the whole point about comedy — and believe you me, I’ve thought about it — is that all comedy is critical. Even if you make a very inclusive joke — like, “How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans” — that’s about the human condition, it’s not excluding anyone, it’s saying we all have all these plans that probably won’t come and isn’t it funny that we still believe they’re going to happen. So that’s a very inclusive joke, but it’s still critical.

All humor is critical. If we start saying, “oh, we mustn’t criticize or offend them,” then humor is gone, and with humor goes a sense of proportion, and then, as far as I’m concerned, you’re living in 1984.

“If Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket, here in Arizona, with over 30 percent of the vote being the Hispanic vote, no doubt that this may be the race of my life,” McCain said, according to a recording of the event obtained by POLITICO. “If you listen or watch Hispanic media in the state and in the country, you will see that it is all anti-Trump. The Hispanic community is roused and angry in a way that I’ve never seen in 30 years.”

Translation: “If Trump’s the nominee, I’m screwed.”

The one and only good reason I’ve found so far for Trump to be the GOP’s nominee.

The meddling of government in the health insurance business is having the predicted results. Insurers are now considering dropping the “bronze” coverage plans … you know the one’s with the lowest payments and the highest deductibles? Guess who buys those? Right … the young and healthy because government has, by force of law, required them to be insured. So if the bronze plans go the way of the former “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” plans, what is then predictable?

If insurers do drop their bronze plans, it would have the effect of further destabilizing the marketplace, according to Sean Mullin, a senior director at Leavitt Partners. That’s because such enrollees, which tend to be lower-risk and want the cheapest plans, will likely leave the marketplace altogether, further depleting the exchanges’ share of healthier enrollees.

Because, you see, the fine will be cheaper than the available “silver” plans.

Entry-level McDonald’s jobs will go to self-service kiosks rather than to humans under a $15 minimum wage, a former chief of the fast-food giant has warned.

In a guest article written on the Forbes site, former McDonald’s USA CEO Ed Rensi wrote that instituting a $15 minimum wage would mean “wiping out thousands of entry-level opportunities for people without many other options.”

Arguing that McDonald’s franchisees would not be able to absorb the additional labor costs that would come with a minimum wage of $15, Rensi suggested that the restaurant instead would turn to self-service kiosks to replace some employees. Customers don’t mind the kiosks and they have been successfully implemented in Europe, he said.

Watch the idiots who haven’t a clue about what are called the laws of economic blow a gasket when they discover that math too has laws, and $15 times 0 hours equals … $0.

Ah well, such is life. Got my new router in while doing this and it makes all the difference in the world. In fact, the speed test says I’m getting double the mps I was getting before.

Is it Friday already? A tip of the hat to Ott Scerb – nice to see him back in action.

So, a CEO has written a little guide for the special snowflakes that inhabit many of our colleges and universities. He gives them 5 points they need to learn before they leave their “safe spaces”. Below is number 1:

To all those of you looking for your “safe place,” I have to wonder: How the hell do you walk out of your dorm (or your parents’ basement) without getting hit by a bus every day?

So on behalf of CEO’s across the country, I’d like to share with you a few lessons that you might want to learn before graduation.

1. The Business World Doesn’t Give A Damn About You

No, really – it’s true. You saw something on the internet that you found offensive? You’ve got the sniffles? Your boyfriend broke up with you? Well, that sucks. Deal with it. I expect you to get your work done on time. Hit traffic that made you late for the fourth time this week? You should have learned after the first time that you needed to leave your house early.

Listen, even the best bosses have their breaking points. Excuses might fly in college, but they’re NOT going to fly when we’re paying you to actually get things done.

I liked this one because it says what they don’t seem to realize yet. In the big, wide world, they’re essentially unimportant. And only good work can make them important to any company. Start the crap they’ve started at school and they can find themselves in the unemployment line very quickly. Read the rest here. [link fixed]

Speaking of the Special Snowflakes, aka The New Red Guard, here they are trying to get something for nothing again claiming racism and bias at Harvard Law School:

“A group of Harvard Law School activists are demanding the graduate school do away with tuition fees, which they argue are “racially biased.”

Members of the group Reclaim Harvard Law School published an open letter Sunday addressed to Law School Dean Martha L. Minow and members of the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — demanding an end to tuition costs that they argue impose an unfair financial burden on students of color, The Harvard Crimson reported.

Tuition at the law school will rise to $59,550 for the 2016-2017 academic year, and students are graduating with an average of $149,754 in debt, according to the law school’s website. Reclaim Harvard Law called the trend “outrageous” and asserted, “as a matter of justice, education should be free.”

“The effects of HLS’ astronomical tuition fees are racially biased,” the group wrote in their letter. “Due to the legacy of centuries of white supremacy and plunder, people of color are less likely to have amassed wealth in the United States. Therefore, these fees disproportionately burden students of color, not only by creating a barrier to attending HLS, but also by constraining the career choices of those who do attend by saddling them with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. How can Harvard Law graduates be expected to advance justice or the well-being of society when they are forced to make career decisions based on paying off this burdensome debt?”

The group did not provide any proposals on how Harvard Law School could feasibly do away with tuition, saying, “answering this is the very job we are paying extraordinary amounts of money for them to do.”

I suppose it never occurs to them that they are among the elite who have been chosen to be members of a particular Harvard Law class and that this seems to most to be exactly what it appears – a horribly obvious attempt to use emotion as an argument to get others to pay for your education. Makes you wonder how good they’ll ever be as lawyers.

One of the things climate alarmists seem to be spectacularly unaware of is how spectacularly poor their “scientific” track record is. For instance:

Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

And:

Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

Of course, now it’s warming and carbon dioxide. In both cases, not only is the science far from settled, it seems to be spectacularly wrong again. At least when Watt talked about a new Ice Age it had actually been getting cooler for 20 years. That was enough for them then. But the fact that it hasn’t warmed at all in 20 years? Yeah, not significant. Funny stuff. Expensive if they get their way, but then as mad as the world has become and with the pending signing of the Paris accords, the excuse to get into your wallet is there, science or no science.

Alarmism is a cottage industry and now that the politicians are involved, it is a cottage industry to pays well.

We believe that everyone—every team member, every guest, and every community—deserves to be protected from discrimination, and treated equally. Consistent with this belief, Target supports the federal Equality Act, which provides protections to LGBT individuals, and opposes action that enables discrimination.

In our stores, we demonstrate our commitment to an inclusive experience in many ways. Most relevant for the conversations currently underway, we welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity.

We regularly assess issues and consider many factors such as impact to our business, guests and team members. Given the specific questions these legislative proposals raised about how we manage our fitting rooms and restrooms, we felt it was important to state our position.

Everyone deserves to feel like they belong. And you’ll always be accepted, respected and welcomed at Target.

I guess you can find idiots in every walk of life, even among those who run retail giants. Tell me, Target, if, in the name of inclusion you end up excluding the desires of the majority of your customer base, how much good will do you think your stance on this sort of nonsense inclusion will buy you.

Considering that, I just became a ex-customer of Target. That sort of absurd nonsense does not make me feel “accepted”, certainly not “respected” and anything but “welcomed”. My “feelings” obviously mean nothing to you. Target, you are pandering, and you’re ignoring your customer base. Social engineering isn’t a retail responsibility. Giving your customers what they want is.

Maybe they’ll figure it out. And maybe they’ll figure out that if you wish to accommodate a minority that “feels” a certain way about themselves, perhaps a single restroom that is “gender neutral” is the answer, and not having them force themselves into dressing areas and restrooms where their natural equipment says they shouldn’t be. This isn’t rocket science, but it appears to be for the ignoramuses at Target.

“A man is a man no matter what they call themselves. I don’t care what they are, who they sleep with, men’s room was designed for the penis, women’s not so much. Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic.”

He’s absolutely right … it is pathetic.

What’s even more pathetic is that Schilling has to hold a certain point of view, apparently, to continue to hold his job. Well, that’s “inclusive” isn’t it? Bye bye ESPN. I thought you were a “sports network”. Apparently you’re an politically correct social engineering network and something I just don’t need in my life.

Finally a bit of good news. Last week I reported that Florida had essentially done away with civil forfeiture and I gave them kudos for dumping that unconstitutional form of stealing by police (illegal search and seizure). Well, Nebraska earns those kudos this week:

The newly signed law provides sweeping reforms. First and foremost, Nebraska now requires a criminal conviction to forfeit property. The accused must be convicted of an offense involving illegal drugs, child pornography or illegal gambling to lose their cash, vehicles, firearms or real estate. Nebraska joins just nine other states that require a criminal conviction as a prerequisite for most or all forfeiture cases.

Here’s my conundrum: if it is immoral, even criminal or civilly liable for these mom-and-pop Christian businesses to deny services based on their fundamental beliefs, why is it not also immoral or legally actionable for large corporations to refuse their services to the citizens of those states where those who govern choose to pass legislation to protect the religious freedoms of their citizenry?

If I’m a huge professional football fan living in Atlanta and the NFL people remove my city from contention for a near-future Super Bowl because they feel my state is discriminating against the transgendered, am I not the victim of discriminatory business practices on the part of the NFL? What about those organizations and corporations that cancel annual conferences and business meetings because of the actions of my state legislature? Aren’t these big corporations refusing to do business with my state simply because they consider our practices immoral, just as those bakeries, florists, and photographers see gays as immoral? Other than scale, I see little difference.

Okay all you smart readers: Tell me where I’m wrong.

I fall on the “scale” side of things. If Bruce Springsteen is open for business in all 50 states and had a contract in NC, why isn’t he considered to be as liable for damages as the cake bakers who refused to cater a gay wedding? That is if we’re talking “truly held and deep moral beliefs” and all.

NoKo’s missile firing failure prompts a Chinese barb and a little “truth to power”, not that NoKo is likely to listen:

“The firing of a mid-range ballistic missile on Friday by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), though failed, marks the latest in a string of saber-rattling that, if unchecked, will lead the country to nowhere,” China’s official Xinhua news agency said in an English language commentary.

“…Nuclear weapons will not make Pyongyang safer. On the contrary, its costly military endeavors will keep on suffocating its economy.”

However, as long as the Chinese continue to subsidize the foolishness, it’ll continue. That said, there are more and more indications that China is becoming fed up with the North Korean regime.

As it turns out, this practice is not uncommon. The WSJ reported last year that at least six municipalities have created special minimum wage carveouts for unions. The logic is straightforward: Kill non-unionized jobs, add more workers to the union rolls, and extract higher fees for union bosses. It’s not a minimum wage hike the labor movement is after, exactly: It’s a penalty on non-union employers, and a payout for modern-day Jimmy Hoffas. Expect unions in California and New York, which recently enacted statewide $15 minimums, to start lobbying legislators for their own sweetheart deals in the near future.

Of course, one can be charitable and note that these measures are backed, in many cases, by well-meaning people trying desperately to keep private sector unions viable in an age of globalization and rapid technological change. But that is no excuse for the kind of craven crony capitalism that’s now underway. If union leaders are going to ask for exemptions to their own laws, the least they can do is drop the pretense that a $15 minimum is a human right, and instead admit that they are in it—at least in part—to increase their own wealth and political power. But then, that would pour cold water on what they have managed to pitch to voters as a righteous moral crusade.

It’s business. And in California, as it pertains to unions, protecting them is business as usual for government.

I am and always have been a huge opponent of civil forfeiture. It should be unconstitutional as it certainly abridges the right to due process. Except, now, in Florida it seems:

Some great news in asset forfeiture reform is coming out of Florida. S.B. 1044, approved by the legislature earlier in the month, was signed into law today by Gov. Rick Scott.

The big deal with this particular reform is that, in most cases, Florida police will actually have to arrest and charge a person with a crime before attempting to seize and keep their money and property under the state’s asset forfeiture laws. One of the major ways asset forfeiture gets abused is that it is frequently a “civil”, not criminal, process where police and prosecutors are able to take property without even charging somebody with a crime, let alone convicting them. This is how police are, for example, able to snatch cash from cars they’ve pulled over and claim they suspect the money was going to be used for drug trafficking without actually finding any drugs.

That’s a great first step. Now we need the same sort of laws in the rest of the US. Civil forfeiture is an abuse of power and, frankly, illegal and immoral (but the drug warriors will tell you it is essential to stopping drugs … something they’ve been so successful in accomplishing). It needs to stop. Kudos to Florida for doing something about it.

Germans appear to be losing faith in the idea of a borderless Europe, as the results of a poll published on Tuesday showed that two-thirds would prefer the government to end the Schengen free-movement zone.

The survey by French pollsters Ifop found that while 60 percent of Italians were against Schengen – an agreement which allows people to travel within the EU without showing a passport – across the Rhine the number of French people wanting borders closed was as high as 72 percent.

The apparent “thank you for allowing us in” from the Brussels bombers has helped pour cold water on the idea that borders between countries in Europe should be uncontrolled. And:

With 79 percent of Germans now believing that some migrants may be potential terrorists, numbers are similar to those in France (80 percent) and a little behind those in Italy (84 percent).

My goodness, who knew so many “Islamaphobic” people lived in … Europe? I thought that was strictly a “right-wing” American problem.

A “New Red Guard” update. This time at Dartmouth where protesters got a sorority to cancel its “Kentucky Derby Party” because it was … “racist and elitist.” Yes, that’s right friends, the NRG thought it was elitist because it was a private party (apparently, in The New Red Guard’s world, those are verboten) and racist because it reminded certain special snowflakes of the ‘Old South’ and gave them the vapors.

“We realized that if anyone on campus felt uncomfortable or upset with the theme, then we obviously shouldn’t have it,” said KDE social chair Jehanna Axelrod.

KDE vice president Nikol Oydanich said house members were convinced by critics that the party was racially offensive because it evoked the aesthetics of the plantation-era South.

“[It is] related to pre-war Southern culture,” she said. “Derby was a party that had the power to upset a lot of our classmates.”

As the article notes, the first Kentucky Derby was run in 1875 and had, therefore, no relation to the “plantation era” South, but was instead a post war sporting event that became a tradition.

But, hey, those are facts and we all know that the historically illiterate who populate our colleges and universities anymore aren’t interested in facts. It’s all about feelings and perception. What it’s not about, at least for the NRG, is anyone’s feelings or perceptions but their own. And they’re they’re certainly not going to let facts stand in the way of those!

Big article in The Guardian about how the rest of them have to halt the “far right” in Europe, because …! Yeah, that’s the part that never gets fully explained, but there were some laugh-out-loud paragraphs that simplicity explain why the “far-right” are making gains there.

For example:

Citizens’ lack of trust in the capacity of governments to get on top of problems is what fuels the growth of far-right parties. These, in turn, threaten Europe’s democratic fabric and social cohesion. If these movements continue proliferating, they will spell the end of the EU as a project, and possibly the end of stability and peace in our region.

Citizen’s lack that trust because government has consistently failed over decades to get on top of the “problems” in question. It is the same reason Trump is so popular here (although I’d hardly call him “far-right). None of the politicians on either side of the pond seem to get this. And that causes what?

European citizens will migrate to political extremes in even higher numbers if EU institutions and governments don’t manage to build trust in the system. Right now, that can be done only if decisive steps are taken both against terrorism and uncontrolled migration. It may sound cynical, but lofty idealism simply won’t do the trick.

And we all know that’s not the prescription the leadership of various European nations are pushing is it? As usual, both here and in Europe, the voice of the people is being ignored for those “lofty ideals” which lead precisely down the road now being traveled.

So?

Tolerance was once described by Merkel as “the heart and soul of Europe”. The painful paradox today is that halting the advance of parties that promote intolerance, want to bury the EU, and feel empowered by recent tragic events, may require some maximalist moral postures to be abandoned.

Or to translate the progressive type who wrote the article, maybe a degree of “intolerance” (i.e. protecting citizens from people who are much more “intolerant” to their way of life than the other way around) is the answer. Because, you know, mindless tolerance has been so well rewarded, hasn’t it?

Speaking of progressives and history, you have to wonder how in the world that movement has been so successful in redefining itself over the years that it has apparently hidden its very nasty roots:

Believing that social progress “required the individual to be controlled, liberated and expanded by collective actions,” progressive intellectuals perceived human persons as “lumps of human dough” to be formed on the “social kneading board.”

That molding, Leonard points out, was to be done “by the best and the brightest, those who, uniquely, ignored profit and power to serve the common good – which is to say, the progressives themselves.”

These experts denied inalienable rights. Their hero, Woodrow Wilson, called them “nonsense.” The editors of the progressive journal, The New Republic, spoke for the movement when it ridiculed individual liberties as “quaint and retrograde.” The leading progressive legal scholar, Roscoe Pound (1879-1964) author of Social Control Through Law, argued the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights “were not needed in the [founders time] and they are not desired in our own.”

Believing that the State superseded even God, progressives encouraged government officials to embrace eugenics – “the social control of human breeding” to rid the nation of perceived undesirables.

Progressive-era eugenics, Leonard writes, “required agreement upon three things only – the primacy of heredity, human hierarchy rather than human equality, and the necessary illiberal idea that human heredity must be socially controlled rather than left to individual choice.”

In 1911, N.J. governor, Woodrow Wilson, signed into forcible sterilization legislation aimed at “the hopelessly defective and criminal classes.” Numerous states and municipalities followed Wilson’s lead.

Read the whole article. How they are able to maintain the veneer of freedom loving individuals who are there to right wrongs when their history is a litany of subjugation, class warfare, elitism, social control and discrimination based on race is beyond me, but – aided and abetted by the media – they have. They pushed eugenics, for heaven sake! Government sponsored eugenics. Remind you of anyone?

Bill Clinton tangled with the Black Live Matter gang and frankly came out on top.

Oh, no, no, no … he can’t do that, say various progressives, because they’re one of the protected minorities. Or so the implication goes. In fact one writer at Slate, after this particular episode, called on Hillary to fire him:

It was a mess, but it’s not the first mess he’s caused for his wife’s campaign. Just a couple of weeks ago, he decried “the awful legacy of the last eight years,” which sounded a lot like a condemnation of the Obama presidency—a presidency that Hillary Clinton is doing her best to tie herself to. And in February, Clinton said that if the system is rigged, it’s because Americans “don’t have a president that’s a changemaker.”

One might attribute this repeated clumsiness to the fact that Bill Clinton is getting old; his hearing is bad, and on the trail he looks frail and wan. Perhaps he’s simply slipping, mentally. But let’s remember that Clinton caused similar problems for Hillary in 2008. There was the time he tried to diminish Obama’s victory in South Carolina by noting that Jesse Jackson won there as well. The time he described the idea that Obama had gotten the Iraq war right as “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” The time—it hurts to remember it—when he complained that the Obama campaign “played the race card on me.”

And yet, after all that, once Hillary had lost and Bill Clinton was supporting Obama, the sloppiness ceased and he was back to performing superbly. (Witness, for example, his celebrated speech at the 2008 Democratic convention.) It is somehow only when he is working on his wife’s behalf that he veers into sabotage. What is needed here is probably a shrink, not a neurologist. Either he doesn’t want her to overtake him, or he doesn’t want her to repudiate him. Regardless, Hillary should shut him down. She can’t divorce him, but she can fire him.

Yup … can’t be talkin’ truth to stupidity now, can we? Especially when the black vote is once again important. Give it a year, black folks … they’ll go right back to forgetting about you as they always have in the past. Meanwhile, Bill, the old codger, is apparently shaking up the myth by telling more truth than he has in his life. Ain’t old age wonderful?

Hillary Clinton had a gaffe-filled, staggeringly bad week last week. It started with her politicizing Nancy Reagan’s funeral and ended with more explosive allegations that her informal adviser Sidney Blumenthal had directly cut and pasted classified intelligence into an unsecured personal e-mail account. But you wouldn’t know it from media campaign coverage, which has been far more occupied with the GOP primary and the escalation of violent incidents at rallies.

Oh, it got a mention here and there, but the Trump thing (the Trump thing as a whole) has sucked all the oxygen out of the news cycle – and it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s purposefully being done by the media. You know, I’d be “shocked, shocked I tell you!”

Students protested yesterday at the Emory Administration Building following a series of overnight, apparent pro-Donald Trump for president chalkings throughout campus.

Roughly 40 students gathered shortly after 4:30 p.m. in the outdoors space between the Administration Building and Goodrich C. White Hall; many students carried signs featuring slogans such as “Stop Trump” or “Stop Hate” and an antiphonal chant addressed to University administration, led by College sophomore Jonathan Peraza, resounded “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” throughout the Quad.

Yes, friends, chalk markings on the sidewalk put them in PAIN! Pain I tell you. They needed protected and the only acceptable way to protect them … the usual, stifle speech and set the university up they way they prefer.

Thankfully a student at Emory understands the danger of pandering to these intolerant crybabies. Amelia Sims writes:

I agree with the protesters: Donald Trump has neither the character, temperament, nor policy knowledge to assume the presidency.

However, classifying support for a major presidential candidate as “hate speech” endangers the democracy that we hold so dear.

Universities do not exist to create insulated echo boxes, which shelter students from ideas that provoke offense or discomfort. In class, professors assign ideologically offensive texts so that students may learn to analyze and challenge these arguments.

Quelling discomforting thoughts prevents a free exchange of ideas. It fosters an environment where resentment and radicalism fester and metastasize.

Students certainly have the right to protest, but I worry about a campus environment that frequently turns to shouting and censorship to defeat offensive ideas.

When protests become increasingly dominated by trivial concerns and histrionic displays, Orwellian newspeak and thought control begin to take hold.

Now if college presidents and administrators would grow a spine and follow her lead, maybe TNRG can call it a day and go back to whining about their grades instead.

The Cuban people, Castro says, won’t “relinquish what they have gained through great sacrifice.” What he really means is that the government won’t relinquish the power it has gained through bloodshed and repression.

No serious person believes there will be riots in the streets of Havana if people are allowed to earn more than 20 dollars a month. Not even the most ardent Castro apologist thinks Cubans will go into open rebellion if they’re allowed to vote for more than one party. Not a soul fears they’ll yearn to relocate to North Korea if they suddenly find themselves with freedom of speech and assembly.

During Monday’s press conference, Castro lashed out when CNN journalist Jim Acosta asked him about political prisoners. “If there are political prisoners,” the dictator said, “give me a list, right now. What political prisoners? Give me their names, and if there are political prisoners, they will be free by tonight.”

Oh, please. Just yesterday—a few hours before Obama landed in Havana—the regime arrested more than 20 people at a Ladies in White demonstration. Secret policemen dragged women to a police bus and threw men onto the ground and handcuffed them. The Ladies in White is an all-women movement of sisters, wives, and daughters of male political prisoners. What does Castro expect us to believe they’re protesting for?

Read the whole thing. Totten has been to Cuba several times and doesn’t at all play the politically correct game Obama and crowd would prefer. He calls Cuba what it is, a shipwrecked state that oppresses its people.

Falsely accusing someone of a crime is never okay and society should never excuse it. Sadly, today’s culture allows anyone to accuse someone of rape or racism and seek forgiveness by claiming the false accuser just wanted to “start a dialogue.”

In the recent race hoax at State University of New York at Albany, where three black women started a fight on a bus and accused a dozen white people of attacking them for being black, a professor at the school claimed they were justified because they started a conversation on race.

“My white students have said this has opened up conversations,” said Sami Schalk, an assistant professor in SUNY Albany’s English department. “Things that are inadvertent, small, but that these white students have no experience with, not being a person of color on this campus.”

That’s a bit like saying all Black Lives Matter wants to do is “start a conversation on race”. It is the cult of the victim desperately looking for victimhood … so, one supposes, they can feel both oppressed and special.

An interesting take on why so many Muslims, especially the young, are becoming radicalized:

As a young Muslim boy growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, it was impossible for me to look up a hadith unless I traveled to an Islamic library, something I would have never thought to do. For all intents and purposes, if I wanted to know about the traditions of Muhammad, I had to ask imams or elders in my tradition of Islam. That is no longer the case today. Just as radical Islamists may spread their message far and wide online, so, too, the Internet has made the traditions of Muhammad readily available for whoever wishes to look them up, even in English. When everyday Muslims investigate the Quran and hadith for themselves, bypassing centuries of tradition and their imams’ interpretations, they are confronted with the reality of violent jihad in the very foundations of their faith.

The Quran itself reveals a trajectory of jihad reflected in the almost 23 years of Muhammad’s prophetic career. As I demonstrate carefully in my book, Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward, starting with peaceful teachings and proclamations of monotheism, Muhammad’s message featured violence with increasing intensity, culminating in surah 9, chronologically the last major chapter of the Quran, and its most expansively violent teaching. Throughout history, Muslim theologians have understood and taught this progression, that the message of the Quran culminates in its ninth chapter.

Surah 9 is a command to disavow all treaties with polytheists and to subjugate Jews and Christians (9.29) so that Islam may “prevail over all religions” (9.33). It is fair to wonder whether any non-Muslims in the world are immune from being attacked, subdued or assimilated under this command. Muslims must fight, according to this final chapter of the Quran, and if they do not, then their faith is called into question and they are counted among the hypocrites (9.44-45). If they do fight, they are promised one of two rewards, either spoils of war or heaven through martyrdom. Allah has made a bargain with the mujahid who obeys: Kill or be killed in battle, and paradise awaits (9.111).

Muslim thought leaders agree that the Quran promotes such violence. Maajid Nawaz, co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation in the United Kingdom, has said, “We Muslims must admit there are challenging Koranic passages that require reinterpretation today. … Only by rejecting vacuous literalism are we able to condemn, in principle, ISIS-style slavery, beheading, lashing, amputation & other medieval practices forever (all of which are in the Quran). … Reformers either win, and get religion-neutral politics, or lose, and get ISIL-style theocracy.” In other words, Muslims must depart from the literal reading of the Quran in order to create a jihad-free Islamic world.

Interesting that the solution is to “reject literalism”. That and the fact that the Quran is now available to everyone without the buffer of an imam’s interpretation. Of course there are also plenty of imams who push this very Surah as the reason Muslims must become activists. Read the whole thing.

The University of California in Berkeley administration must decide whether to provide abortions on campus to students who deem their uninterrupted education more important than the lives of their unborn children.

The Berkeley student senate has passed a resolution demanding that abortion, referred to as “medication abortion,” be made available on-campus so that female undergraduate and graduate students could “continue their education with little disruption.”

The resolution explains that the university’s Tang Center used to perform abortions in the 1980s, but now there are no longer trained abortionists at the center. Abortion is a right, their logic goes, and so abortion access is a right, too.

The resolution does not suggest how to fund its demand. But Aanchal Chugh, primary sponsor of the bill, told Campus Reform that school administrators should be willing to take pay cuts in order to fund on-campus abortion services. Students, she says, should not bear any financial burden.

You have to wonder how these spoiled children would feel if they knew their parents had had so little regard for their lives that they’d made the same demand in their day? Of course, such a demand in their parents day would have received a raucous horselaugh (well, maybe not a Berkeley). It’s all about their convenience. They don’t want to have to leave campus to abort their child:

There are five abortion providers within 15 miles of the Berkeley campus, all of which accept MediCal health insurance. FPA Women’s Health, four miles from the campus, performs free abortions for women who lack health coverage for the procedure.

“So many Americans are out of job, but we got all these illegals working here. Something’s got to happen,” he says.

Izzo represents a bit of a trend. In 2008, just 6 percent of Chicago primary voters selected Republican ballots. This year, it’s up to 10 percent. And that’s not far away from the 13 percent back in 1980, the year Ronald Reagan attracted so-called blue collar Reagan Democrats.

I’d agree … there is certainly some of that. But there is also a good bit of voting for Trump in the primaries with no intention at all of voting for him in the general election, but instead, for Hillary. That said, among blue collar workers, the illegal immigration issue is where both parties are completely disconnected from their voters – or at least those voters who make up the bulk of their base. You know … the one’s from “flyover” land.

Former Hillary Clinton IT specialist Bryan Pagliano, a key witness in the email probe who struck an immunity deal with the Justice Department, has told the FBI a range of details about how her personal email system was set up, according to an intelligence source close to the case who called him a “devastating witness.”

Yeah, we’ll see. Right now it’s only “devastating” in the media. We’ve all but been warned that the DoJ is not eager to pursue this at all. And, of course, to this administration specifically, and Democrats generally, the “rule of law” is an inconvenience.

You remember Margaret Thatcher famously saying that socialism worked fine until you run out of other people’s money? Well, a disbelieving Venezuela is learning the truth of that statement the hard way:

Thatcher’s axiom did eventually catch up with Venezuelan socialism. Even when oil prices were hovering above $100 per barrel, the government’s finances went increasingly into the red. Now that a barrel of Venezuelan crude is trading at only $25, the situation has reached a breaking point. External debt has gone up by 115 per cent in the last decade and inflation is out of control: the IMF says it will reach 720 per cent this year. The situation is so bad that the government recently had to use 36 Boeing 747 cargo planes to import five billion notes of its worthless currency.

Behind the macroeconomic figures is a deepening humanitarian crisis. The government lacks the dollars to pay for imports which, compounded with price controls and their devastating effect on production, has caused widespread shortages. People queue for hours only to find empty shelves in government-run supermarkets. Even if they’re lucky, they can only buy a few products— in return for which they must undergo fingerprint scanning under the country’s rationing system. A national poll found that the percentage of Venezuelans eating two or fewer meals a day increased by more than 10 percentage points last year. Looting is now a common occurrence.

The economic crisis is having a particularly nasty impact on healthcare. According to the Venezuelan Pharmaceutical Federation, only 20 per cent of the drugs that doctors require are available. People must rely on social media to scout the country for medications for their loved ones. The lack of spare parts means that much medical equipment is useless: 86 per cent of X-Ray machines are out of service, for example. “Babies born prematurely are dying like little chicks” was a February headline of El Nacional, Venezuela’s last independent daily. It quoted a resident doctor in one of the public hospitals saying that, due to the shortages, they cannot save the lives of all patients. “We are operating under war conditions,” she said.

So, despite all the examples and all the warnings, things go exactly as they were predicted to go in that country. Meanwhile, in this country, we have a significant portion who feel that “free stuff” is their entitlement and are feeling the “Bern”. To me, given all the examples of what they want that have failed in the world, this say a lot about their intelligence … or lack thereof.

Barack Obama has sharply criticised David Cameron for the UK’s role in allowing Libya to become a “shit show” after the fall of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, in an unprecedented attack on a British leader by a serving US President.

Mr Obama said that following a successful military intervention to aid rebels during the 2011 Arab Spring revolt, Libya was left to spiral out of control – due largely to the inaction of America’s European allies.

In a candid US magazine interview, Mr Obama said: “When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong… there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up.”

Well one thing he didn’t ask himself is “what would a real leader do”, because he has no idea what leadership entails. But he knows a lot about casting blame for failures in which he should have been leading. And, of course, real leaders don’t do that.

A while back, we noted a report showing that the “sneak-and-peek” provision of the Patriot Act that was alleged to be used only in national security and terrorism investigations has overwhelmingly been used in narcotics cases. Now the New York Times reports that National Security Agency data will be shared with other intelligence agencies like the FBI without first applying any screens for privacy.

Yes, that’s right, the NSA is sharing data domestically now … and it has nothing to do with either national security or terrorism … as initially promised.

Anyone surprised?

And a final update about “The New Red Guard” involves Western Washington University where TNRG wants control:

Students at Western Washington University have reached a turning point in their campus’s hxstory. (For one thing, they’re now spelling it with an X—more on that later.) Activists are demanding the creation of a new college dedicated to social justice activism, a student committee to police offensive speech, and culturally segregated living arrangements at the school, which is in Bellingham, up in the very northwest corner of the state.

At the heart of this effort lies a bizarrely totalitarian ideology: Student-activists think they have all the answers—everything is settled, and people who dissent are not merely wrong, but actually guilty of something approaching a crime. If they persist in this wrongness, they are perpetuating violence, activists will claim.

The list of demands ends with a lengthy denunciation of WWU’s marginalization of “hxstorically oppressed students.” The misspelling is intentional: “hxstory,” I presume, was judged to be more PC than “history,” which is gendered, triggering, and perhaps violent. It’s easy for me to laugh at these clumsy attempts to make language obey the dictates of political correctness—but I laugh from a position of relative safety, since I am not a WWU professor.

On the other hand, if a member of campus were to insist on the proper spelling of the word, would he or she (or xe) have to answer to the Committee for Social Transformation?

Of course they would. But seriously, knowing this sort of nonsense is rampant at this University, why would any parent want their child to go there? That’s a question the University of Missouri is trying to answer as we speak.

Oh, and one more thing to note – “Student-activists think they have all the answers—everything is settled, and people who dissent are not merely wrong, but actually guilty of something approaching a crime.”

A burglary this week at a Minneapolis Islamic center prompted the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to issue a statement of concern Friday.

Jaylani Hussein, director of CAIR-MN, said surveillance video captured images of a man breaking into the Umatul Islam Center on Lake Street and 2nd Avenue S. between 11 p.m. and midnight Wednesday.

[…]
He said the break-in is the first major incident involving a mosque in the Twin Cities since comments made by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump touched off a wave of anti-Muslim commentary and some incidents of harassment nationwide.

Overreaction time!

Gov. Mark Dayton met with about two dozen Muslim community leaders and imams Sunday morning at the Umatul Islam Center in south Minneapolis and commiserated with them about a break-in and vandalism at the mosque last Wednesday.

And the Gov even held a press conference. Turns out it was a well known burger who randomly targeted the mosque.

Meanwhile, in other Twin City news (Mar 1):

Computer equipment, electronics and musical instruments known as “Singing Bowls” were stolen from two Minneapolis churches on the night of March 1, prompting a warning from police for religious institutions.

And no, the Governor didn’t show up to console the Christian leaders at these churches or hold a press conference to condemn them, because …. ?

We students in the class began discussing possible ways to bring these issues up in our classes when COMS 930 instructor Dr. Andrea Quenette abruptly interjected with deeply disturbing remarks. Those remarks began with her admitted lack of knowledge of how to talk about racism with her students because she is white. “As a white woman I just never have seen the racism… It’s not like I see ‘Nigger’ spray-painted on walls…” she said.

That’s what you get on campus now when you try to discuss any topic The New Red Guard (in this case, at KU) deems taboo or you use a taboo word even as you are describing your “white privilege” and didn’t aim it at anyone. Their answer is to purge the offender. So they’re boycotting her class. But, as usual, there is probably a much simpler reason – bad grades. And Dr. Quenette had the temerity to point out that perhaps some of those people of color weren’t dropping out because of “racism” but instead of bad grades:

This statement reinforces several negative ideas: that violence against students of color is only physical, that students of color are less academically inclined and able, and that structural and institutional cultures, policies, and support systems have no role in shaping academic outcomes. Dr. Quenette’s discourse was uncomfortable, unhelpful, and blatantly discriminatory.

Or said another way, the spoiled children didn’t like being confronted with an uncomfortable truth. And they want their participation trophy … now!

The University of Pittsburgh’s Student Government Board held a public meeting on Tuesday to discuss the traumatizing visit the night before from “dangerous” homosexual and Breitbart Tech Editor Milo Yiannopoulos, during which students described themselves as feeling “hurt” and “unsafe.”

Now don’t forget the most important thing about this event. It was a non-compulsory and extracurricular event featuring a gay journalist expressing a difference of opinion from the mainstream at the college.

Yeah, that was it. Read the whole thing to see how badly traumatized these special social flowers were because of it and how the whole earth, or at least much of Pitt, is being moved to accommodate this “hurt”. Simply amazing.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has proposed $15.3 trillion in tax increases, according to a new report, and would raise rates on virtually everyone, including the politically all-important middle class.

Not surprisingly for a candidate who has made income inequality his central issue, Sanders’s plan would wallop the rich, an analysis released Friday by the Tax Policy Center shows.

[…]

But Sanders, going where few politicians dare, would also raise taxes on middle- and low-income families, with those in the dead center of the income spectrum facing a $4,700 tax increase. That would reduce their after-tax incomes by 8.5 percent, the report said.

Professor Melissa Click, recently the face of the ugly left during the recent University of Missouri protests, has been notified by the Board of Curators that they’re terminating her employment there. Click, you may remember, was charged with assault when she confronted a student reporter and grabbed his camera while calling for “some muscle” to help her force him to leave. Interestingly, the Board of Curators also cited her actions at the Homecoming Parade a month before as grounds for dismissal as well. You can read the whole investigation here. So much for her tenure hearing … ain’t gonna happen. You can read the whole investigation and the letter for the Board here. I did last night. Very interesting. I can’t say she didn’t deserve what she got, and, frankly, it’s good to see bad actions ending up having consequences. Apparently she thought and admission and apology were sufficient. The Board did not.

Speaking of the SJWs, those at Brown University simply can’t get over the fact that they’re being required by professors to turn in class assignments on time after their activism has totally exhausted and drained them emotionally:

Liliana Sampedro, one of the students who compiled the diversity ultimatum, argued that refusal to grant such accommodations “has systemic effects on students of color,” who she said may sometimes feel obligated to prioritize their activist work over their studies.

“I remember emailing the professor and begging her to put things off another week … I hadn’t eaten. I hadn’t slept. I was exhausted, physically and emotionally,” Sampedro recalled. The professor nonetheless insisted that she submit a previously-assigned research presentation on time, which she claims forced her to stay up late to finish the project after having already spent hours working on the list of demands.

Because that’s why they went to Brown – to “prioritize their activism work over their studies”. I know a bunch of folks at my college who “prioritized their partying over their studies” and they got no break from professors. All kidding aside – this is our special snowflakes getting just a inkling of what is in store for them when they finally leave the protection and “safe space” that is Brown.

Some leftists/SJWs are figuring it out:

Speaking of Fascism, there is also a disturbing trend on the left nowadays that involves rejecting free speech/freedom of expression as a core value, because that speech could possibly be hurtful to someone, somewhere. This is not only dangerous but it also works against us, because as leftists we are often labelled as threats by the state and at the very least, we are unpopular by society in general. Does this not mean that freedom of thought and expression are crucial to our struggles?

Of course, at this point, not enough of them are doing so and there’s no indication that this is really a trend, however, it’s hopeful. Read the whole thing.

Camile Paglia is a Bernie supporter, for one reason, because he is offering “free” college. But she is not a Hillary supporter in the least. And before she heads off on a riff about “free” college, she blasts the “establishment” Democrats in general and Hillary Clinton specifically (also taking a shot at the establishment media):

Democrats face a stark choice this year. A vote for the scandal-plagued Hillary is a resounding ratification of business as usual–the corrupt marriage of big money and machine politics, practiced by the Clintons with the zest of Boss Tweed, the gluttonous czar of New York’s ruthless Tammany Hall in the 1870s. What you also get with Hillary is a confused hawkish interventionism that has already dangerously destabilized North Africa and the Mideast. This is someone who declared her candidacy on April 12, 2015 via an email and slick video and then dragged her feet on making a formal statement of her presidential policies and goals until her pollsters had slapped together a crib list of what would push the right buttons. This isn’t leadership; it’s pandering.

Thanks to several years of the Democratic party establishment strong-arming younger candidates off the field for Hillary, the only agent for fundamental change remains Bernie Sanders, an honest and vanity-free man who has been faithful to his core progressive principles for his entire career. It is absolutely phenomenal that Sanders has made such progress nationally against his near total blackout over the past year by the major media, including the New York Times. That he has inspired the hope and enthusiasm of an immense number of millennial women is very encouraging. Feminists who support Hillary for provincial gender reasons are guilty of a reactionary, reflex sexism, betraying that larger vision required for the ballot so hard-won by the suffrage movement.

While I usually don’t agree on a lot of what she says, I love the way she says it. In this case, I’m with her about Clinton.

Speaking of “free college”, in case you missed it, Louisiana tried that. And, guess what? It worked about as well as “free health care”:

A person receiving “free” tuition may not see it (or even care), but subsides actually raise the total cost of an education. The core problem is that they remove the paying customer—in this case the student—from the equation.

Without the subsidy, the paying customer receives the direct benefit for the service and bears the direct cost. If that person doesn’t think the cost is worth it, they don’t pay.

Louisiana’s program replaces this paying customer with groups of government officials. These officials neither receive the direct benefit nor endure the direct cost of obtaining an education. These groups do, however, benefit a great deal from obtaining more of your tax dollars.

And they rarely bear any direct cost from either increasing your taxes or delivering a substandard education product. (The incumbency rate is fairly high for politicians.)

Works great for government (bigger, more government jobs, more taxes) but not so hot for the taxpayer – as usual.

And now, the announcement of the “nutritional emergency” makes it official. Venezuela is out of food, and it’s only a matter of time before Venezuelans are quite literally starving due to a long series of terrible decisions by their leaders.

That’s right, it’s no longer about not having diapers and toilet paper. Nope, the socialist government has run the country out of food as well. Feel the Bern!

Peggy Noonan approaches the popularity of Trump, and for that matter, Sanders in the presidential race with a little different take. Instead of talking about the elite, I think she makes a differentiation that better explains why those two have any political viability at all:

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.

They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.

Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and western Europe is immigration. It is THE issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.

I think it gets us closer to the discontent felt by much of the country. It has become clear that the “protected” are feathering their nests at the expense of the unprotected and, as Noonan says, will never suffer the effects of their policies because they’ve protected themselves from such an occurrence – or at least tried to. Yes, it’s a bit oversimplified. There’s much more going on, but it helps explain what no one has satisfactorily explained to this point.

A little reading for you about how awful the Obama Syrian policy (or lack thereof) has been using Samantha Powers own words against her and the administration.

Even die-hard supporters of President Barack Obama’s “realist” approach to foreign affairs are nauseated by the White House’s Syria policy. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, a vocal supporter of the nuclear weapons agreement with Iran, is fed up with nearly five years of the “fecklessness and purposelessness” of a Syria policy that “has become hard to distinguish” from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s. “Syria is now the Obama administration’s shame,” Cohen wrote last week, “a debacle of such dimensions that it may overshadow the president’s domestic achievements.” Ambassador Dennis Ross and New York Times military correspondent David Sanger also published articles excoriating Obama’s policies in Syria. There is a military solution, it’s “just not our military solution,” a senior U.S. security official admitted to Sanger. It’s Putin’s.

Think of the charge of “war crimes”, something the Dems used to love to try and hang on George W. Bush. It’s a pretty negative review.

Speaking of negative reviews, here’s one for the laughs it brings. All you ever wanted to know about Kanye West and then some. Kanye will not be happy, but I chuckled all the way through it. Some good points, in general, are made, not just about West:

West’s prepubescent views on everything Kanye haven’t stopped over the past decade, but everyone is too scared to mock him because he’s black and they don’t want to be called racist. He’s aware of this, so when his clothing line fails he says it’s because people were too “racist” to buy his stuff (this from a guy who gets to wear the Confederate flag on his bomber jacket). His clothing line was made up of people wearing brown nylons and strange “skin-colored” sweatshirts that looked like they were made out of Nazi lampshades. We recently learned that this foolish mistake put him $53 million in the hole and he took to social media to beg Mark Zuckerberg to bail him out to the tune of $1 billion. No word yet on why you get to be $947 million in the black when you screw up that badly. Forbes’ two cents is Yeezus might be able to get the money tax-free.

Read the whole thing … it’s worth it. Another example of the Emperor having no clothes – in this case, literally.

On Tuesday, however, it was the state of Wisconsin that had the last laugh. Just one business day after Oliver predicted mass disenfranchisement due to voter-ID laws, Wisconsin held its first election with the voter-ID requirement. And according to a study by the University of My Eyeballs, turnout increased 55 percent statewide over the last similar spring-primary election.

In 2013 — the last contested statewide supreme-court election — around 364,000 voters turned out in Wisconsin. On Tuesday night, that number skyrocketed to about 564,000 voters. Even the 2011 Supreme Court primary, which took place during the electric Wisconsin public-union battle, drew only around 420,000 voters — well short of Tuesday’s total.

And the turnout bump wasn’t due to rural Caucasians flocking to the polls en masse. In the city of Milwaukee, which is 53 percent ethnic minority, the vote nearly doubled, from 34,000 to 65,000. Earlier, local election watchers had predicted a turnout of about 30,000.

Georgia, my home state, has had a voter ID law for a few years and have had exactly the same experience. This is the “global warming” of voting. Or said another way, if they keep repeating the big lie often enough, it has to be “true” doesn’t it – regardless of whether or not the facts destroy the myth.

So how are we doing economically and how is that reflected in the job market? Well, Dems are going to tell you we’re at “full employment” because the fudged unemployment rate is around 5%. This chart gives lie to the claim:

Women fare slightly better, but as you can see, the US is bottom of the barrel when it come to “employment to population ratio” for men. Heck of a job there, Dems. Oh, and Bernie says he’ll fix this. Just sayin’.

Pertaining to the GOP and SCOTUS, file under “predictable” and cross-file under “stupid” as in “Stupid Party:

The playbook is the same every time. Even in the face of less consequential political fights, Republicans start out talking tough. Then, leadership allows the weakest liberal members to begin dissenting from the party line and even trash talking the party to the media. Next, leadership says they have to embark on the legislative process to be fair but still oppose the initiative and will personally fight against it. Then, depending on how many votes it needs to pass, they decide whether to throw in with the liberal Republicans.

And sure enough:

Yesterday, the dominos began to fall. While Sens. McConnell, Hatch, and other senior leadership members were still talking tough, liberal Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) announced his support for Obama to put forth a “consensus” nominee. And although Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the Majority Whip, reiterated his desire that the next president fill the vacancy, he said that holding hearings is entirely up to the Judiciary Committee Chairman and scheduling a floor vote is entirely up to McConnell.

And then:

Obama knows how to push the RINO buttons. He will nominate someone who comes highly recommended in the legal field and it will be a big “first.” Perhaps the first transgendered Muslim immigrant to be picked. He knows Republicans are very sensitive to looking like “obstructionists,” especially in the face of such “historic” progress. At that point, it will become a slow bleed. You will see Sens. Murkowski, Collins, Kirk, and other liberals join with Heller and call for “fair hearings.” (How eerie that just two weeks ago, I called for Sen. Grassley to be replaced because his spot on the Judiciary Committee Chairman is too vital for someone so fickle.) Grassley will undoubtedly cave to pressure and that will get the ball rolling.

And once the nominee goes through the meat grinder of confirmation hearings, how can he not get a floor vote? To that end, the weakest members of the committee, beginning with Lindsey Graham, will likely vote the nominee out of committee and onto the floor.

In the wake of Beyonce’s controversial Super Bowl halftime performance of her new song “Formation” — which critics say contains an anti-cop message — police and politicians around the country have been speaking out against it.

But the criticism could be manifesting itself in practical ways, given what’s happened since police in Tampa, Florida, got a request to work her April 29 concert in town.

Usually off-duty officers sign up to work concerts and sporting events for extra cash, but to date no officers have signed up for the show, WTVT-TV reported. And given it’s expected to sell out, that could be a security issue.

That’s a great way for cops to get their message across.

Speaking of no one signing up, I got a huge laugh from this story. You remember Ed Schultz don’t you? Once with MSNBC and now with Russian (propaganda) TV? Well, like Kanye West, Ed has become a little full of himself. Ed decided to start a “Super PAC” feeling pretty sure he could save the middle class:

Last year Ed Schultz started the Americans for a Strong Middle Class Super PAC.

“I feel like I am perfectly positioned with my national platform, with my name and visibility and credibility with the middle class, to be the person to head up this super PAC,” he told told the Fargo Forum. “We are a 527; we are a nonprofit; we are incorporated in Washington, D.C., and we are going to get involved in issues around the country that are vital to a strong middle class, with our focus on jobs and wages, health care, education, trade agreements and justice.”

I’m sorry I coughed up a lung laughing at the donation total. That’s about what Big Ed’s ideas are worth, and, in the market place of ideas, that’s what he was able to bring in. Capitalism – don’t you love it? No wonder the left hates it.

Seattle Parks and Recreation is facing a first-of-a-kind challenge to gender bathroom rules. A man undressed in a women’s locker room, citing a new state rule that allows people to choose a bathroom based on gender identity.

It was a busy time at Evans Pool around 5:30pm Monday February 8. The pool was open for lap swim. According to Seattle Parks and Recreation, a man wearing board shorts entered the women’s locker room and took off his shirt. Women alerted staff, who told the man to leave, but he said “the law has changed and I have a right to be here.”

“Really bizarre,” MaryAnne Sato said. “I can’t imagine why they would want to do that anyway!”

Oh, my … hoist on their own petard, eh? The other lung was coughed up on this one. This isn’t bizarre at all. This is precisely what critics of this sort of stupidity said would happen.

According to the SJW’s who pushed this “gender inclusiveness” law, all one has to do is “feel” like another gender and they’re in like Flynn. Apparently, at least that day, this guy was feeling particularly female. And yet, those exposed to the “woman” felt the situation was “bizarre”. Imagine.

Loved this quote – by the way, he’s talking about the new law and the SJWs:

“Sort of works against the point they’re trying to make. They’re causing people to feel exposed and vulnerable with the intention of reducing people feeling exposed and vulnerable,” said pool regular Aldan Shank.

Exactly right, sir. This is how laws that sound wonderful in drunken dorm room bull sessions end up when put into practice. As usual, never factored in is something called “human nature”.